To excellent Scriber posts on sin, karma, and progress: one from a Buddhist, one from a pagan.

As of today, I am leaving the 9rules blog community to join The Daily Scribe blog community. The decision was tough and long, and I wish the 9rules folks the best, but the Scribe is just a better fit for Making Chutney.

If you haven’t visited the Scribe, it’s a new, interfaith blogging community for religious bloggers with either educational or ministerial credentials. Good writers all. I’ve got the RSS feed up in my bookmark toolbar, and I’ve found myself visiting most posts. If you want to read good religious blogging, the Scribe’s the place.

Yet Another Unitarian Universalist and The Journey recently put up series of posts about Jim Fowler’s faith development theory. The Journey’s post is a good summary for those not familiar with it. Yet Another UU’s post is a good summary of some of its shortcomings. What follows is something of a reply to both, en lieu of a long comment on either.

We UUs seem, as a tradition, to only be interested in “developing” Fowler’s fourth stage, the Individuative-Reflective stage that first pops up around high school or so. We believe in that stage. We seem to think that stage is faith. All other orientations toward faith are immature, we seem to think, and unworthy of us.

But whether you buy Fowler’s stages or not, children and youth cannot skip stages. Yet we tend to educate our movement’s children as though Individuative-Reflective faith is the only way of doing faith. Perhaps we teach them as though they’re already at that level. Or perhaps we teach them as though children’s RE is valuable only insofar as it’s an IR faith prep program.

Some of you know that I worked for Fowler for five years, until his retirement a year ago. Click to continue reading “Unitarians and James Fowler”

Photos of Israeli snowflakes in Lebanese hell.

After that time, when I was twelve-years-old, when grandma made me put that “this car stops at all garage sales” bumper sticker on the second-hand Cadillac, I was ashamed of grandma and grandpa.

They smoked and cussed and drank. They yelled at each other. They kept weird friends who’d come over to play gin rummy till after midnight, snubbing their noses at their little Nazarene suburb. And they certainly did stop at every garage sale they came across. You could tell by looking at all the junk in their yard, the junk that wouldn’t fit in the “junk room” (my uncle’s old bedroom) or the 800 sq ft portable building in the back that was supposed to be grandpa’s workshop but was too filled with junk to be usable. After spending no more than five minutes with them, folks would start calling them “Archie and Edith.” I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew it made grandpa cuss, and everyone else laugh. That embarassed me too.

My other grandparents weren’t like that. They lived across the street—that’s how my parents met—so I invariably saw both pairs if I saw one. My other grandparents were quiet and told stories about Model A’s and life before the Dust Bowl. When I’d stay over, they’d let me stay up to watch Carson’s monologue before switching over to M*A*S*H. My other grandparents were comfortable and quiet.

When grandpa died from gut cancer, I was still ashamed of him. He’d never quit cussing or yelling. True, he’d quit drinking, but that was from the diabetes. He hadn’t become the man I thought he should be.

Then my dad surprised us all with a story from his childhood. Click to continue reading “Like a damn Unitarian”

Here are some sample texts for trying out Spiritual Reading: Click to continue reading “Sample texts for practicing Spiritual Reading”